What advice would you give to young people today about
life, about career? How they can have a job,
how they can have an impact, how they can have a
life they can be proud of. So it was kind of fun.
I got invited to give the commencement speech back at the.
I went to college for two semesters and dropped out and
went on to do my tech stuff, but they still wanted me to come back
and give a commencement speech. Speech. And I've got that pinned on my
Twitter account. I still feel good about everything that I said there.
And my biggest point was that the
path for me might not be the path for everyone. And in fact, the advice,
the path that I took and even the advice that I would give based on
my experience and learnings probably isn't the best advice
for everyone. Because what I did was all about this
knowledge in depth. It was about not just having this surface
level ability to make things do what I want, but to really understand them
through and through, to let me do the systems engineering work and to
sometimes find these inefficiencies that can be bypassed
and that the whole world doesn't need, that most programmers or
engineers of any kind don't necessarily need to do that. They need to do a
little job that's been parceled out to them. Be reliable,
let people depend on you. Do quality work with all of that.
But people that do have an inclination
for wanting to know, know things deeper and learn things deeper,
you know, the. There are just layers and layers of things out
there. And it. It's amazing. It's. If you're the right person that
is excited about that. I. The world's never
been like this before. It's better than ever. I mean, everything that was wonderful
for me is still there, and there's whole new worlds
to explore on the different things that you can do
and that, you know, it's hard work.
Embrace the grind with it and understand as much
as you can, and then be. Be prepared for
opportunities to present themselves where you can't just say,
this is my goal in life, and just push at that. I mean, you might
be able to do that, but you're going to make more total progress. If you
say, I am preparing myself with this broad set of tools,
and then I'm being aware of all the way things are changing as
I move through the world and as the whole world changes around me,
and then looking for opportunities to deploy the tools that you've built,
and there's going to be more and more of those types of things
there where an awareness of what's happening, where the inefficiencies
are, what things can be done, what's possible versus
what's current practice, and then finding those areas where
you can go and make an adjustment and make something that
may affect millions or billions of people in the world,
make it better, when maybe from your own example,
how are you able to recognize this about yourself? That you saw the layers
in a particular thing and you were drawn to discovering deeper
and deeper truths about it? Is that something that was obvious to you that
you couldn't help? Or is there some actions you had to take to actually allow
yourself to dig deep? So, in the earliest days of personal computers,
I remember the reference manuals and the very early ones,
even had schematics of computers in the background in
the back of the books, as well as firmware listings and things. And I could
look at that. And at that time, when I was a younger teenager,
I didn't understand a lot of that stuff, how the different things
worked. I was pulling out the information that I could get, but I
always wanted to know all of that. There was magical information
sitting down there. It's like the elder lore that some greybeard wizard
is the keeper of. And so I always felt that pull
for wanting to know more, wanting to explore the
mysterious areas there. And that
followed right in through all the things that got the value, exploring the video
cards, leading to the scrolling advantages,
exploring some of the academic papers and things, learning about BSP trees
and the different things that I could do with those systems,
and just the huge larval phases, going through aerospace,
just reading bookshelves full of books again,
that point where I have enough money, I can buy all the books I want.
It was so valuable there where I was terrible
with my money when I was a kid, my mom thought I would always be
broke because I'd buy my comic books and just be out of money.
But it was like all the pizza I want, all the Diet Coke
I want, video games, and then books, books. And it
didn't take that much. As soon as I was making twenty seven k a year,
I felt rich and I was just getting all the things that I
wanted. But that sense of books have always
been magical to me. And that was one of the things that really made me
smile is Andre had said he found, when he came over to my,
he said he found my library inspiring, just. And it was great
to see, you know, I used to look at him. He's kind of a younger
guy. I sometimes wonder if younger people these days have the same
relationship with books that I do where they were such a cornerstone for
me in so many ways, but that sense that, yeah, I always wanted
to know it all. I know I can't. And that was like one of the
last things I said. You can't know everything, but you should convince yourself
that you can know anything. You know, any one particular thing.
It was created and discovered by humans. You can learn it, you can find out
what you need on there and you can learn it deeply. Yeah.
You can drive a nail down through whatever layer cake problem
space you've got and learn a cross section there. And not
only can you have an impact doing that,
you can attain happiness doing that. There's something so fulfilling about
becoming a craftsman of a thing. Yeah. And I don't want to tell people that,
look, this is a, a good career move, just you know, grit your teeth and
you know, and bear it. I, you know, you want people,
you want to. And I do think it is possible sometimes to find the joy
in something like it might not immediately appeal to you, but I had told
people early on, like in, in software times, that I,
you know it, a lot of game developers are in it just because they are
so passionate about games. But I was always really more
flexible in what appealed to me. Where I had a said, I think
I could be quite engaged doing operating system work or even
database work. I would find the interest in that
because I think most things that are significant in the world have
a lot of layers and complexity to them and a lot of opportunities hidden
within them. So that would probably be the most important
thing to encourage to people is that you can, it's like
weaponized curiosity. You can deploy your curiosity to find,
to kind of like make things useful and valuable to you even
if they don't immediately appear that way.